A.D.D. -- Yeah, You Know Me

Here is what is fast becoming a cliche: mom is addicted to meth, hooks up with a sexual predator, and abandons children in his care for days at a time seeking drugs. Or: dad manufactures meth, mom uses it, both abandon children in the care of "friends" who turn out to be, surprise, known sexual predators. Or: mom is on meth, patrimony is contestable, but there are plenty of sexual predators around to, um, care for the kids. If the kids are lucky, the grandparents take active interest in rearing the kids.

You can imagine all sorts of horrors afflicting these poor kids, but one common denominator is attention deficit disorder. High impulsivity, aggressive behavior, inability to focus, highly susceptible to random stimuli--these behaviors are prevalent among the children my clinic sees every day. It has gotten to the point where the nurse practitioner, after providing me with ten minutes of playful interaction with a patient, can trust my assessment. "What do you think, Kevin? A.D.D.?" Whoa, yeah.

So I go home. It is easy to succumb to the hypochondria medical and nursing students often experience: you begin recognizing symptoms in everyone around you, including yourself. This particular diagnosis, A.D.D., also has acquired a bad reputation for being the proverbial hammer that made every unmanageable child look like a nail. So to speak. However, enough time has passed for me to positively conclude the applicability of this diagnosis to my own daughter.

No surprise, really. Born addicted to crack, she began life with potential complications to her neural-chemical development. (Thankfully, no sexual predators.) Mind you, she is very bright. Talk to her and you find an imaginative, articulate and playful kid. Yet as Jenn and I, her teachers, and a few friends have noticed, she can become hyperactive, controlling, aggressive and wildly impulsive. Not all of this can be explained by neural-chemical reactions, of course. She is estranged from her biological parents; her grandmother, who really raised her, died a few months ago; for the last two years she has had to adjust to a new home thousands of miles away from the home she had known for the first six years of her life; as well as new parental figures, a sibling to compete with (and a baby, too, which is no fair), a new school, new rules, new expectations, new this, new that. Who wouldn't feel a bit dissociated?

We're waiting for the health insurance paperwork to finalize, but we already have a pediatrician, who is willing to make a professional assessment. Will she need drugs? The "bad reputation" link mentioned above opposes administering Ritalin or other drug treatments, which don't address the child's "real problems" and take responsibility for solving them out of the child's hands, thereby disempowering the child, lowering her self-esteem. Say, what? If my daughter's problems stem from neural-chemical disorders she cannot control without the help from drugs, I don't see how the inevitable and constant behavior corrections will help her self-esteem one whit. As school becomes more challenging and more demanding of her attention and self-control, she runs the risk of failures she cannot be held responsible for, yet which will impact her education and personal development for years to come.

Granted, the author is right to note environmental factors; prolonged exposure to television has been recently well-documented as a contributor to A.D.D. But, um, how again will "centering and grounding" help?

The tools and techniques that they use to promote centering and grounding include breathing exercises, balancing the brain with music and poetry, eye focusing, and working with root points and acupressure techniques to rebalance and calm a child’s energy.

This is ass-backwards. Kids with A.D.D. don't sit still long enough for breathing exercises.

However, my own positive experience with serotonin-inhibitors, another "overly prescribed drug," leads me to be more skeptical of the criticism of drug therapies than of the therapies themselves. Jenn works with a woman whose own children benefitted greatly from drug therapies, experiencing improvements in disposition and behavior--that is, going from angry and aggressive children to happy and playful--within merely a week's time. It's anecdotal evidence, hear-say, no less, but that, too, can be important information. I think it's worth a shot. It beats treating A.D.D. kids like they did when I was growing up, throwing otherwise bright kids into the "special ed" classes. Talk about blows to self-esteem. Oy.